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Sex in a Teenager’s Room?

One of the lovely things about not having children (besides never having to counteract a toddler’s propensity for covering all surfaces with what experts call “sticky”) is that I will probably never need to stare down the barrel of teenage sexuality.

It’s unlikely that I will ever have to call another parent to see whether it’s O.K. if her 16-year-old child sleeps in my 16-year-old child’s bedroom, a call that I imagine is punctuated by the “Fiddler on the Roof” lyrics, “Is this the little girl I carried?” and a modicum of faint sobbing.

Yet every time I read or hear about parents’ policies toward teenage sleepovers, I find myself imagining how I would officiate in the same situation; it’s the child care version of watching “Jeopardy” and screaming out the answers.

It started two summers ago when I read that Angelina Jolie told the British tabloid The Sun that her mother allowed the 14-year-old Miss Jolie to live with her boyfriend in her mother’s home “like a married couple.” I winced slightly. If I had, say, a 16-year-old who was having protected sex in a committed relationship, I would happily allow him to sleep with his partner in my house. But at 14? At that age, I wore drop-seat pajamas and thought chlamydia was the innkeeper in “Zorba the Greek.”

Other parents I’ve read about have also struck me as, if not feckless, then feck-deficient. I wouldn’t emulate the customer services adviser in England who, when asked by her 16-year-old daughter if the daughter’s boyfriend of three months could spend the night, ran out and bought the young lovers a double bed so they could sleep in comfort. Nor the physician in Toronto who sent off her 16-year-old for his stint as a camp counselor by arming him with condoms and nonoxynol-9 spermicide wafers.

But surely there is some happy medium? “I’m a great believer in the Edwardian house-party approach,” said Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners. “Back then, people would have large parties and invite the lovers of their guests. They’d put these guests in separate bedrooms. And then stay out of the hallway. Parents should put the boyfriend or girlfriend into the guest room. And then go into their own room.”

Such a worldview dovetails with my own, and not only because it injects into the proceedings the descriptor “Edwardian,” a word rich with the aroma of neatly manicured beards and tiny dill-flecked sandwiches. Benign neglect puts the onus on the teenagers. I worry only about the OSHA ramifications here: while creeping around a boyfriend’s parents’ pitch-black house at 3 a.m. once, I formed the opinion that sex is dangerous because you can plunge down a darkened stairway.

Perhaps there is an arrangement whose mandate incorporates a few more light bulbs? Susan Merrill, a painter in Stockbridge, Mass., who has three children now 18 or older, said of herself and her husband: “We want to meet the boy or girlfriend. We would love to take them out to dinner with our child. We tell our child: ‘Here are the rules. This is our house, and while you are welcome to have a friend stay the night, we expect you to consider sex to be a private, two-person activity. That means you go to bed when we do, you get up when we do, and if you are really well behaved, we’ll make you pancakes for breakfast. We do not want to be involved in any way in your sex life. We don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to see it. We expect you to wash your sheets and towels. In other words, we expect you to behave like good guests.’ ”

This setup strikes me as fairly ideal: a well-mixed cocktail of caution and tolerance with a possible pancake chaser. As the benevolent manager of your family campgrounds, though, you would have to be prepared for the occasional camper who takes an especial liking for the site.

As Nina Lorez Collins, who worked in publishing for 18 years before recently becoming a life coach, knows. Two years ago, Ms. Collins — having decided that her 17-year-old daughter Violet was in a loving and committed relationship with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Nile — allowed the couple, with the permission of Nile’s parents, to sleep together in her home in Brooklyn.

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“I didn’t want to think, ‘Where are they tonight?’ ” Ms. Collins said, expressing a common parental refrain. Nine months into the teenagers’ relationship, Nile decided to defer college, at which point Ms. Collins noticed him staying the night more frequently. She asked her daughter, “So, is the plan for Nile to take his gap year at our house?” To which Violet nodded shyly and asked “Yes, is that O.K.?”

Violet was then a senior in high school. Ms. Collins knew that frequent arguments about the two young lovers’ location “would be a lot of negotiating during a very stressful period in Violet’s life.” So Ms. Collins gave her assent. “I called my ex-husband and I called Nile’s mother, both who were like, ‘Um. O.K.’ People always ask me, ‘Where were Nile’s parents during all this?’ They live in TriBeCa. They’re lovely.’ ”

Ms. Collins’s assent was contingent on a few stipulations. Violet had to attend to her schoolwork as rigorously as ever, including applying to 13 colleges. Every morning, Nile had to take out the trash; walk the dog, Muffin; and look for work.

The cohabitation went swimmingly. By the following fall, the two young lovers had decided to go to separate colleges, but both in New England. “Nile’s parents are entirely grateful to me. Nile grew up a lot that year,” Ms. Collins said. “He learned to carry out tasks efficiently.”

But the greater dividend of his stay was that it gave Ms. Collins’s three younger adolescent children a view of committed love that far surpassed most of what they had seen from adults. Ms. Collins said, “I hope they won’t settle for less.”

What’s intriguing about the arrangements of Ms. Collins and Ms. Merrill is that they include the assignment of household tasks. As Ms. Martin wrote in her 1985 treatise “Common Courtesy,” “I hope we can take it for granted that individual freedom must be tempered somewhat by the need for maintaining a harmonious society.” This tempering may take the form of washing bedsheets or walking dogs named Muffin.

Were I a parent, I would hope to be able to ape any policy of Ms. Martin, Ms. Merrill or Ms. Collins. I enjoy having people stay in my apartment, so I know I would be good at welcoming a child’s friend into my home initially.

But then if my child and his friend’s subsequent activities inside my home ever became a source of worry, I suppose I could always employ what I think of as the parent curveball. That’s where you guide your child and his loved one into your child’s bedroom while saying, “And in the meantime, your dad and I will be in our own room, doing the same thing.”

Correction: August 18, 2013

The Circa Now column last Sunday, about teenagers who are given permission by their parents to have sex, misquoted a line from “Sunrise, Sunset,” the song from “Fiddler on the Roof.” The lyric is, “Is this the little girl I carried?” not “Is this the little child I carried?”

Henry Alford is the author of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2013, on Page ST2 of the New York edition with the headline: Sex in a Teenager’s Room. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe